Despite not winning best film at the Baftas 2013, Steven Spielberg's Lincoln
takes the noble high ground over it's competitors, says Rupert
Christiansen.

Despite Steven Spielberg’s latest epic, Lincoln, failing to win best film at last night's Baftas, I feel impelled to award it my own laurels. Yes, it is a magnificent artistic achievement, magisterially directed, intelligently scripted and sumptuously designed, as well as being acted with astonishing intensity by Daniel Day-Lewis, Sally Field and Tommy Lee Jones. But what struck me as most remarkable about the film is its moral tone.

It deals, coincidentally, with the same theme (the fight to extend liberty to the disenfranchised and oppressed) as two other current hits, Les Misérables and Django Unchained, but it has neither the sugar-coating of the Victor Hugo musical nor the sleazy brilliance of Tarantino’s western.

I cannot vouch for the movie’s historical accuracy – so much about Lincoln remains contested – but, without resorting to pomposity or sentimentality, Spielberg has built the story into a stirring drama of dilemma worthy of Racine or Schiller.

Hollywood sensationalism, vulgarity and cynicism are absent here: there is no glamorised violence, no gratuitous sex. Instead the film focuses steadily on showing how the dirty game of politics can be played for greater stakes than immediate personal advantage, how human beings can be motivated by impulses higher than lust or greed, and how principles are tested and stretched by the terrible exigencies of war and the workings of democracy.

The word that came to my mind as I left the cinema is an unfashionable one: noble. This is a noble film, about noble people. Quentin Tarantino doesn’t do noble.